Little Acorns
With the Covid curtailed Flat season reaching its conclusion our attention is naturally drawn to the National Hunt campaign, yes there have been jumps racing since the resumption in June but for the purists it is the winter period that is seen as the “proper” part of the NH scene.
For this month’s piece we are going to be looking to see if we can uncover a few nuggets that will help us get the jumps campaign off to a profitable start during the month of November.
Firstly, we will take a look at how things have gone so far in the 2020/21 NH season with the following Table which shows (as at mid-Oct) the top 20 trainers by Total Earnings since July 1st.
No real surprise that the maestro of Ditcheat has got off to a flyer in terms of prize money but the eye is drawn to the 32% winning Strike Rate which compares very favourably with his normal average of 24% based on the last 5 seasons.
It is also noticeable that backing all his runners so far in this campaign would have yielded a small profit of +6.16pts to 1pt level stakes at the returned SP.
Again, this is significant as generally speaking the yards runners tend to be overbet and during the last 5 seasons you would have lost 14-15% of your bank backing them blindly.
It is reasonable to expect that both the market and the other trainers will have a say in matters as the season progresses but hopefully, we can make hay over the next month before those factors kick in.
How have the runners by NH race type fared so far in this campaign?
In terms of Strike Rate and profitability the Chasers have been the star of the show so far, but which type of Chase event has fared the best?
If we refer to the “Actual” versus the “Expected” the Handicappers have been performing really well in both the standard races and the Novice Handicaps.
The vibes on the Paul Nicholls racing website read positively so we are going to take a punt that the current trend with his Chasers will roll over into the next month.
System 41 – Back the runners trained by Paul Nicholls during the month of November when they are competing in Novice and Standard Handicap Chases.
We have already covered the Fergal O’Brien yard in other content, so the next trainer of interest is Tom Lacey who is based at Ledbury in rural Herefordshire.
As can be seen from the above table the yard operates at a fairly good level with a 1 in 5 winner to runner ratio and a healthy level stake profit over the past 5 campaigns. To be fair this has not gone unnoticed with the betting public as the more recent stats show the profit has been harder to come by.
In the current campaign the yard has to date been operating at a 24% Strike Rate and in the first couple of weeks of October their runners have performed to 64% based on the Racing Post’s “RTF” criteria. Hopefully this will continue, and we can look forward to a positive November.
Referring to the above Table once again we can see that they do well in terms of P&L with their Bumper runners and this trait continues into the Hurdles but has tailed of somewhat once they are faced with fences.
If we now reflect on the current campaign, we find the following: –
Only 1 of the Bumper runners has made the frame but the Hurdlers especially those in the Handicap races have done well with 11 wins from 27 such types.
Eight of those winners were ridden by Jonathan Burke whilst the other 3 all had different jockeys aboard.
System 21 – Back the runners trained by Tom Lacey, during November, when competing in Novice and Standard Handicap Hurdles when Jonathan Burke is down to ride.
Happy punting and stay safe.
Steve Carter
